Mary Riddell is a columnist and a political interviewer for the Daily Telegraph. She writes on topics ranging from family to foreign policy and is particularly interested in criminal justice. Her focus is what is going on, for better or for worse, in the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Labour wasted money on health reforms, says Ed Balls

Does Ed Balls have a Plan B? He's certainly got one for George Osborne, as he explained in his tub-thumping speech today at the LSE. The "stubborn" Chancellor should, in his view, adopt an emergency cut in VAT to boost growth and avoid long-term damage to people's way of life.

This, in Mr Balls's view, would be a modest halfway house between Mr Osborne's current strategy and the Alistair Darling plan for a more gradual deficit reduction. In other words, the Chancellor should repent now before it's too late.

Mr Balls, his critics may think, is hardly equipped to offer masterclasses in repentance. He is said only this week to have turned down overtures from Ed Miliband's allies to admit that Labour spent too much when it was in power.

But there are signs that Mr Balls is not as recalcitrant as some people claim. Today, for example, he as good as admitted that Mr Darling's deficit reduction plan was right and his initial view was wrong. And while he called charges of Labour profligacy a "fiction", he admitted that – like all governments – it had not spent every penny wisely.

Asked for examples, he came up with the "destabilising and wasteful" reorganisation of primary care trusts from 2003 to 2007. This will hardly be music to the ears of Alan Milburn, who writes in the Telegraph today that the Cameron health reforms are the "biggest car crash in NHS history".

Mr Milburn, who was health secretary until 2003, and Tony Blair have both urged Labour to follow where they led. Neither may be gratified to hear a central aspect of the modernisation – and marketisation – programme they launched being so denigrated by Mr Balls. Mr Milburn today urges Mr Miliband to return to a more Blairite agenda.

Labour, however, seems as unlikely to adopt Plan M as Mr Osborne is to follow to Mr Balls's rather sensible Plan B.